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Giving Stakeholders What They Want (When They Don’t Know What They Want)

About the Talk

October 25, 2016 2:15 PM

Charlottesville, VA

Charlottesville, VA

Have you ever delivered exactly what your supervisor, colleagues, or users asked for … only to hear “No, this isn’t what I wanted at all”? Or presented a solution that fulfilled every requirement you were given, but was then soundly rejected or ignored? Have you tried to find out what your end users needed only to hear the echo of old Henry Ford saying “if I’d asked them what they wanted they would’ve said ‘faster horses’”?

These communication issues can sink your team or project before it gets started – but they don’t have to.

Librarians know that people often don’t ask for what they really need, and they’ve developed reference interview techniques to solve this problem. By asking the right kinds of questions at the right time, you too can deploy ninja librarian mind-reading tactics!

Content strategist Anne Haines will draw on over a decade of library reference experience to help you discover new strategies for wowing stakeholders by giving them what they didn’t even know they needed.

What you’ll learn:
•Learn approaches for interpreting verbal and nonverbal cues in order to develop deeper empathy for stakeholders’ needs and demands
•Understand the power of question negotiation, active listening, and other strategies which can help you collaborate with stakeholders to define and ultimately satisfy their needs
•Consider ways to apply in-depth interview techniques, whether face-to-face or electronic, real-time or asynchronous, in order to foster a more transparent and productive collaboration with stakeholders